Night Watch
The containment breach
of luminescent
jellyfishes, their
numberless
swarms, their scent
of deep sea or saline,
is an excretion
from the aquarium,
instigated
by the pressurized glass
tanks rupturing
tonight.
Among the constellations’
reflections
on the windless river
the sea jellies flow into
after launching
out from pipes,
the watchmen in black
rowboats patrol.
The lanterns in their
clasped fists
moving up and down
in the rhythm of glowing
bodies
drifting home
until the night is so dark
they are
only the lanterns they are
holding.
Complex Playground
After watering the sand at the complex’s playground
children raise towers they are molding
with fresh mud and encase dolls in them
and tower over them
like sundry terra cottas and watch
the Sun dry
their city. They play
until they knock down the city, its fall
as full sounding as books’ spines
cracking open for the very first time
and are careful with their hands
not to get them grazed, returning the ground as it
was,
the towers razed,
each doll sticking out
like a humanoid statue, left behind
then wind buried,
their location as neglected as an emperor’s tomb.
Children get home.
Until dried dirt is soaped off each face
parents don’t know.
In the Garden
Open my throat
and put in an apple squeezed to its core—
like returning an ore to its mine,
like melted gold flooding into depleted veins,
every pore sweetening.
Perhaps finally
a tree grows! Lord, let me let it,
keep the doctors away. My bones
give way to strong branches—
my gangly arms break into blossom
and my burnt brow
greens like no other green.
The interminable roots devour
and heave—heaving—
seek water
and live.
Of course apples!
One ripens near my mouth.
I have bitten it before it was breath.
Juices—flowing from teeth,
ointment
applied with fingertips dipping
into my skin, dripping
like honey, and I
believed hardly.
Easier than standing in wildfire,
I will keep my indifferent shadow under water.
A pillar I am not, but I will be
where I left
the seed I meant to throw.
